Comment Re:Permenant Beta (Score 1) 295
Yes, changing it to say "alpha" would be putting it nicely. It WAS beta quality until they hired bing developers to pretty it up. Now it doesn't work on my mac, pc or android phone.
Build an Open-Source Electric Car In About One Hour 188
First time accepted submitter joe5 writes "Like what Elon Musk has done and want to go all Etsy and build your own electric car? That's apparently now possible now thanks to the OSVehicle Tabby — dubbed the first "Open source vehicle" (memo: it may be cool, but it ain't the first). The OSV guys are taking pre-orders for the Tabby starter kit, with both the two-seater or four-seater configurations going for €500. Then you click to add options. (Note: seats is an "option" so that's the level of luxury you are dealing with here.) When the transaction's complete, OSV sends the parts to your home and you can download the plans and start building. Since the Tabby is open source, OSVehicle will also look to a community of owners and tinkerers for suggestions and recommendations."
Comment Re:outsourcing your data (Score 1) 463
Sounds great! Who do you recommend. Maybe Amazon or perhaps Softlayer/The Planet?
Lawmakers Threaten Legal Basis of NSA Surveillance 206
Nerval's Lobster writes "The author of the Patriot Act has warned that the legal justification for the NSA's wholesale domestic surveillance program will disappear next summer if the White House doesn't restrict the way the NSA uses its power. Section 215 of the Patriot Act will expire during the summer of 2015 and will not be renewed unless the White House changes the shocking scale of the surveillance programs for which the National Security Administration uses the authorization, according to James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), an original author of the Patriot Act and its two reauthorizations, stated Washington insider-news source The Hill. 'Unless Section 215 gets fixed, you, Mr. Cole, and the intelligence community will get absolutely nothing, because I am confident there are not the votes in this Congress to reauthorize it,' Sensenbrenner warned Deputy Attorney General James Cole during the Feb. 4 hearing. Provisions of Section 215, which allows the NSA to collect metadata about phone calls made within the U.S., give the government a 'very useful tool' to track connections among Americans that might be relevant to counterterrorism investigations, Cole told the House Judiciary Committee. The scale of the surveillance and lengths to which the NSA has pushed its limits was a "shock" according to Sensenbrenner, who also wrote the USA Freedom Act, a bill to restrict the scope of both Section 215 and the NSA programs, which has attracted 130 co-sponsors. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has sponsored a similar bill in the Senate."
Comment outsourcing your data (Score 1) 463
And this is why you should always outsource your data backup and security. 3rd parties are way more experienced and equipped at losing your data than you ever could be! It's like the cloud, but for paper records and tape backups!
Comment Re:Who, now? (Score 1) 385
okidata with ps/pcl support. Toner cost is a bit higher per page on the lower end models, but fine if he isn't printing books.
Comment Re:At least they're being more honest about it now (Score 1) 385
Clearly your experience with xerox is different than mine (I've found them nothing but unreliable garbage and their "technicians" are not very well trained to say the least), but then again I had to threaten Dell with legal action to get them to replace motherboards that had known bad nvidia chips that were dying (they kept trying to blame an operating system issue until it eventually escalated to someone in Round Rock), so it might simply be a matter of who is acting shitty at the moment. I concur that HP has their own problems though. We applied the latest SPP to a gen 8 server at the end of last year which promptly made the raid arrays impossible to configure and the workaround from their techs didn't work. We were eventually able to downgrade the firmware but that reintroduced several other bugs the firmware upgrade was intended to fix. Hopefully HP will get it all straightened out before I have to pay for the patches, but only time will tell! Yay for shortsighted profits!
Comment Re: Sad times (Score 1) 133
Play "patrol the boarder" on Xbox Live for just $19.95 per month! See how many illegal border crossings you can catch!
Comment Re:Degaussing? Really? (Score 1) 128
a drill is usually faster than zeroing out the drive and works for 99% of cases. Maybe not nsa, but it will even slow them down a bit.
Comment so how is this different (Score 1) 211
Great service. It sounds suspiciously like a bank account... so their big breakthrough is you get a checking account with no checks?
Comment let it slide... (Score 1) 559
Wait until apple offers a buyout. They have clearly been interested in gaming for years and have the cash to allow developers to keep working while the total fail that is wii u fades into memory. Nintendo just completely missed the mark. They had college students on the internet working on controller-less games that used the wii and instead of embracing the idea they let Microsoft hire these students to create the kinect and wasted their energy on a fat ugly tablet that is limited in function. If they were smart they would go after a kinect type controller-less system and offer a free app for iphone to act as a supplemental controller. The phones would make a great controller as they already have accelerometers, speakers, mic, etc in them and allow the full "family gaming experience" nintendo was shooting for originally.
RSA Boycot Group Sets Up Rival Conference 84
judgecorp writes "The group of security experts who urged people to boycot the RSA conference (over allegations that the security firm RSA has taken a $10 million bribe from the NSA to weaken the security of its products) have put together a rival conference called TrustyCon just down the road from San Francisco's Moscone Center, where the EMC-owned firm will have its conference at the end of February."
Comment Re:Americans (Score 1) 324
No, I'm not saying that at all. In fact that is also against the NSA's mandate. They should be (according to their mandate) using this technology to detect and prevent military threats against the U.S. Whether that mandate is acceptable to the EU is a geopolitical question but falls within the construct of U.S. laws (protect your citizens from outside forces, don't go digging through their stuff unless there is a darn good and very specific reason) and thus if we are upsetting our neighbors in the EU we can "easily" change our laws and update their mandate to be something else like "help harden all electronic defenses to protect from foreign attack" but if they are ignoring the laws of their own country that means that there is no way to change their mandate as they just ignore it which undermines our system governing internally in the United States.
Comment Re:wait a second.... (Score 2) 324
Well that is their mandate, whether or not I am ok with spying on others is irrelevant. Theoretically if a majority of Americans determine that this isn't ok we can disband the NSA altogether, but the problem with Spying on Americans is that spying on Americans in direct contradiction to their mandate and therefore there is no working check or balance on their power thus circumventing the Republican Democracy (under the argument that "we the people" empowered elected representatives to establish the NSA but demand that their powers are limited to external entities to insure they follow the rules of the Constitution). In this case it is being reported that they are doing their job, which is totally different as it is currently an acceptable behavior within the confines of the U.S. culture's social contract (which could be changed in theory through the constructs of the nation's laws and systems of governance).
Comment wait a second.... (Score 5, Insightful) 324
Ok, so I get the whole whistle blower thing but isn't this what the NSA is supposed to be doing? Spying on Americans is ok to get fussy about but why was this leaked and why doesn't the NYT realize that this actually does set back U.S. intelligence? Are they also going to release a story detailing what the Chinese are doing to spy on US from leaked Chinese intelligence?
